The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ his handful of earth on the roots of an ivy, which, clinging about those brown masses of stone, in days to come, he trusts will be typical of their mutual, remembrance as he breathes the silent prayer: 'Lord, keep our memories green!'

      So end the college-days of these most uproarious of mirth-makers and hardest of American students; and the hundred whose joys and sorrows have been identified through four happy years, are dispersed over the land. They are partially gathered again at Commencement, but the broken band is never completely united. On the third anniversary of their graduation, the first class-meeting takes place; and the first happy father is presented with a silver cup, suitably inscribed. On the tenth, twentieth, and other decennial years, the gradually diminishing band, in smaller and smaller numbers, meet about the beloved shrine, until only two or three gray-haired men clasp the once stout hand and renew the remembrance of 'the days that are gone.'

      'They come ere life departs,

      Ere winged death appears.

      To throng their joyous hearts

      With dreams of sunnier years:

      To meet once more

      Where pleasures sprang,

      And arches rang

      With songs of yore.'

      GO IN AND WIN

      Will nothing rouse the Northmen

      To see what they can do?

      When in one day of our war-growth

      The South are growing two?

      When they win a victory it always counts a pair,

      One at home in Dixie, and another over there!

      North, you have spent your millions!

      North, you have sent your men!

      But if the war ask billions,

      You must give it all again.

      Don't stop to think of what you've done—it's very fine and true—

      But in fighting for our life, the thing is, what we've yet to do.

      Who dares to talk of party,

      And the coming President,

      When the rebels threaten 'bolder raids,'

      And all the land is rent?

      How dare we learn 'they gather strength,' by every telegraph,

      If an army of a million could have scattered them like chaff!

      What means it when the people

      Are prompt with blood and gold,

      That this devil-born rebellion

      Is growing two years old?

      The Nigger feeds them as of old, and keeps away their fears,

      While 'gayly into battle' go the 'Southern cavaliers.'

      And the Richmond Whig, which lately

      Lay groveling in mud,

      Shows its mulatto insolence,

      And prates of 'better blood:'

      'We ruled them in the Union; we can thrash them out of bounds:

      Ye are mad, ye drunken Helots—cap off, ye Yankee hounds!'

      Yet the Northman has the power,

      And the North would not be still!

      Rise up! rise up, ye rulers!

      Send the people where ye will!

      Don't organize your victories—fly to battle with your bands—

      If you can find the brains to lead, we'll find the willing hands!

      JOHN NEAL

      John Neal was born at the close of the last century, in Portland, Maine, where he now resides; and during sixty years it has not been decided whether he or his twin sister was the elder.

      He was born in 1793. When he was four weeks old, he was fatherless. His school education began early, as his mother was a celebrated teacher. From his mother's school he went to the town school, where he once declared in our hearing that he 'got licked, frozen, and stupefied.' That he had a rough time, may be inferred from the fact that his parents were Quakers, and he, notwithstanding his peaceful birthright, fought his way through the school as 'Quaker Neal.' He went barefoot in those days through a great deal of trouble. Somewhere in his early life, he went to a Quaker boarding-school at Windham, where he always averred that they starved him through two winters, till it was a luxury to get a mouthful of brown bread that was not a crumb or fragment that some one had left. At this school the boys learned to sympathize in advance with Oliver Twist—to eat trash, till they would quarrel for a bit of salt fish-skin, and to generalize in their hate of Friends from very narrow data. We have heard Neal speak of the two winters he spent in that school as by far the most miserable six or eight months of his whole life.

      Very early, we think at the age of twelve years, he was imprisoned behind a counter, and continued there till he was near twenty; and by the time he was twenty one, he had worked his way to a retail shop of his own in Court street, Boston. We next track him to Baltimore, where, in 1815, if we are not out in our chronology, John Pierpont, John Neal, and Joseph L. Lord were in partnership in a wholesale trade. Neal's somersets in business—from partnership to wholesale jobbing, which he went into on his own hook with a capital of one hundred and fifty dollars, and as he once said, in speaking of this remarkable business operation, 'with about as much credit as a lamp-lighter'—may not be any more interesting to the public than they were to him then; so we shall not be particular about them in this chapter of chronicles.

      At Baltimore he was very successful, after he got at it, in making money, but failed after the peace in 1816. This failure made him a lawyer. With his characteristic impetuosity, he renounced and denounced trade, determined to study law, and beat the profession with its own weapons.

      This impulse drove him at rather more than railroad speed. He studied as if a demon chased him. By computation of then Justice Story, he accomplished fourteen years' hard work in four. During this time he was reading largely in half-a-dozen languages that he knew nothing of when he began, and maintaining himself by writing, either as editor of The Telegraph, coëditor of The Portico, (for which he wrote near a volume octavo in a year or two,) and also as joint-editor of Paul Allen's Revolution, besides a tremendous avalanche of novels and poetry. We have amused ourself casting up the amount of this four years' labor. It seems entirely too large for the calibre of common belief, and we suppose Neal will hardly believe us, especially if he have grown luxurious and lazy in these latter days. Crowded into these four years, we find: for the Portico and Telegraph, and half-a-dozen other papers, ten volumes; 'Keep Cool,' two volumes; 'Seventy-Six,' two volumes; 'Errata,' two volumes; 'Niagara and Goldau,' two volumes; Index to Niles' Register, three volumes; 'Otho,' one volume; 'Logan,' four volumes; 'Randolph,' two volumes; Buckingham's Galaxy, Miscellanies, and Poetry, two volumes; making the incredible quantity of thirty volumes. He could no more have gone leisurely and carefully through this amount of work, than a skater could walk a mile a minute on his skates. The marvel is, that he got through it on any terms, not that he won his own disrespect forever. We do not wonder that he manufactured more bayonets than bee-stings for his literary armory, but we wonder that he became a literary champion at all. With all the irons Neal had in the fire, we are not to expect Addisonian paragraphs; and yet he has in his lifetime been mistaken for Washington Irving, as we can show by an extract from an old letter of his, which we will give by and by.

      A power that could produce what Neal produced between 1819 and 1823, properly disciplined and economized, might have performed tasks analogous to those of the lightning, since it has been put in harness and employed to carry the mail. When genius has its day of humiliation for the wasted СКАЧАТЬ